Black Flags and Windmills in Maximum Rock n Roll

In Black Flags and Windmills,
scott crow tells the story of the formation of the Common Ground
Collective in New Orleans amid the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina in fall 2005, which disproportionately affected African-American
communities already made vulnerable by disinvestment, poverty, and
state inaction. Equal parts memoir, movement history, anarchist polemic,
and organizing handbook, the book traces the early months of Common
Ground’s efforts to build collective power and self-sufficiency among
residents of the predominantly black Algiers neighborhood, working under
the banner of “Solidarity Not Charity.” These efforts came at a time
when the emergency response by federal and state agencies often ignored
and even terrorized poor communities of color while residents contended
with trauma, illness, violence, and the loss of homes and lives. The
Common Ground story, as the many pages of glowing reviews attest, is a
modern narrative of heroism without heroes, demonstrating the vitality
and effectiveness of anarchist principles in the face of emergency.

This
edition adds a new foreword and rewritten epilogue, photographs from
the early days of the CGC, two interviews with the author, a collection
of emails and communiqués from crow to supporters, CGC founding
documents, and a list of the actions CGC undertook. Though I haven’t
read the first edition, I think these parts alone merit another look at
the book (though probably not a purchase) from people who have. They
show how crow at the time envisioned and related the actions of the CGC
to activist solidarity networks. This complements the main narrative,
which retells the history based on recollections and oral histories from
several years later. The less-than-initiated (like myself) will also
appreciate the breadth of the list of tasks the CGC worked on,
reproduced in the appendix. Collective members and volunteers pursued
these efforts with an “emergency heart” (crow’s phrase), a horizontalist
spirit, and a willingness to serve local black leaders that
demonstrates anarchism at its best and least dogmatic.

Unfortunately
many of the things that make this book great are also shortcomings, and
because it’s justly lauded I’ll permit myself to be picky. To begin
with, as a memoir the book works almost too well. crow is clearly wary
of presenting the story of forming the CGC without accounting for his
own formation as a white, male solidarity activist who entwined his fate
with those of black residents of New Orleans. Thus, after the first few
pages, in which crow and now-infamous Brandon Darby journey to
inundated New Orleans in search of their comrade King, a former Black
Panther Party member and community activist, the book turns to crow’s
personal history and how he came to call himself an anarchist. To be
very clear: this is a very important part of the story and shouldn’t be
omitted. But at times it can be jarring, and, as crow clearly
understands, can play into the mainstream media’s desire for a
figurehead and hero. During these sections he also enters brief excurses
on the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, the Black Panther Party, and
the Zapatistas. Readers already familiar with the histories of these
movements will tire of these reminders. By the same token, for people
new to anarchism and social movement history, these are valuable
sections the book can’t do without.

Furthermore, because the
story is told—rightly—from crow’s own perspective, we miss out on how
the CGC evolved in the years that followed. crow left New Orleans to
return to Austin after nearly two months of intense labor, punctuated by
the trauma of grief, loss, and threats of violence from the state. He
returned frequently thereafter, but was no longer involved on the ground
in the day-to-day. From the epilogue, we know that as the emergency
receded, the CGC slowly transformed into a more stable and traditional
non-profit agency, while retaining a radical culture and its “Solidarity
Not Charity” mission. crow seems ambivalent on this point, at times
calling it cooptation and at times celebrating the valuable work the CGC
still does. But we don’t get any sense of how this happened. It’s not
enough to assert that Power (which crow capitalizes, in my view
gratingly, to refer to the state and capital) by necessity coopts and
controls. To understand what the CGC story means for future dual power
organizing (both resisting the capitalist state and prefiguring its
non-coercive alternative), it would help to see the steps by which it
became integrated into the “non-profit industrial complex.” As a
movement history, the book does not do this.

This means there are
gaps in its usefulness for anarchist political theory as well. We don’t
get a larger sense of why anticapitalist and anti-state movements for
collective security and prefiguring a better world flourish in the gaps
left by disasters, whether socio-ecological (as in Katrina) or
socio-economic (as in Detroit). crow asserts that Power and the state
exist only to control. But despite being punctuated by hostile
interventions by the police and military, as well as ineffective ones by
FEMA and the Red Cross, Algiers and the Lower Ninth Ward are places the
state seemed to abandon at the time. Power (with a capital P) does
control, but also controls by ignoring. This is important for anarchists
to understand, but there isn’t much space devoted to these finer
nuances of power. Nor is there a longer discussion of one of the most
interesting aspects of the book: the sharp contrast between violent,
racist, and hostile police force, and the somewhat friendlier, more
cooperative military. This contrast shows in practice more shades of
grey within the state than crow’s theoretical discussions sometimes
admit.

Lastly, while crow never celebrates the horrific and
totally avoidable disaster that created the conditions for Common
Ground’s emergence, we must wonder what it takes to build dual power
without some traumatic breakdown. Both anarchist solidarity activists
and vulture capitalists can rush into the vacuum left by state neglect,
as New Orleans since Katrina shows. At times, statements crow makes
about the superiority of the horizontal tactics of the former sound
eerily resonant with what you might hear from a right-wing libertarian.
What the people of New Orleans deserve is a set of durable, democratic
and non-hierarchical institutions that deliver the necessities of life,
not a shoestring organization of overworked, committed militants on one
hand and Blackwater on the other. Indeed, when CGC tried to buy public
housing that was slated for demolition, really threatening capital and
the state that facilitates it, their efforts were apparently sabotaged
(http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/repression-against-grassroots-hurricane-relief-lingers-in-new-orleans/).
And speaking of the state, readers hoping for dirt about scumbag FBI
informant Brandon Darby (now a conservative columnist at Breitbart,
unsurprisingly), this isn’t the place. Darby gets just a few paragraphs,
mostly about his rash egotism and crow’s regrets about defending him.

I
would strongly recommend this book to people less familiar with
anarchism and social movement history than your average well-read punk
or anarchoid is. For the person in your life who thinks anarchists only
wear black and smash windows, or doesn’t know who the Zapatistas are, or
sees no place for the kind of armed self-defense (yes, with guns) that
the immediate post-flood situation required, this is a perfect book. If
you don’t know much about the grassroots efforts post-Katrina (and I
didn’t), it’s a compelling read, and crow’s passion and heart comes
through on every page. I don’t want to accuse crow of not writing the
book I want him to have written. But for the reasons I discussed above, I
think we still need another history of the CGC, one that brings us up
to the present, perhaps told by Malik Rahim, crow’s comrade and former
Panther who co-founded Common Ground with him. Without such a history,
we have a detailed snapshot told by one man of heroic efforts in
traumatic times, instead of a tool we can continue to return to for
guidance in similar situations as emergency wanes and the status quo
creeps steadily back in.